Sidney’s Arcadia and the conflicts of virtue

Introduction

This book seeks to interpret Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia as an articulation of a particular ethical outlook: that ethos which has been termed Philippist after the followers of Philip Melanchthon. Biographically speaking, it is well established that Sidney was familiar with the work of Melanchthon and the Philippists.¹ The ethical viewpoint that I argue the Arcadia articulates, is, naturally, identified with the romance’s author, reflecting his political and religious philosophies, which are, understandably, often also discernible in his real-life public activities. However, unlike the method employed by Blair Worden in his book The Sound of Virtue, I do not wish to draw direct parallels between the author’s political activities (informed by his religious allegiances) and the events and characterizations of his fiction. Rather, I shall endeavour to show how Sidney’s romance, as an example of a genre of literature that offers its authors a broad canvas on which to work, dramatizes the diverse and often contradictory implications of certain aspects of Elizabethan morality, puts that morality under stress, and fosters a moral viewpoint that is, in the end, moderate, inclusive and optimistic.

As such, the events and characters of the Arcadia do not represent, allegorically, their counterparts in Sidney’s real-life world, but articulate a part of Sidney’s contribution to what Louis Montrose has usefully termed the ‘Elizabethan political imaginary’: ‘the collective repertoire of representational forms and figures—mythological, rhetorical, narrative, iconic—in which the beliefs and practices of Tudor political culture were pervasively articulated’.² Montrose’s subject is Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which is, like the Arcadia, a manifestly literary articulation of the beliefs and practices of Tudor political culture. Of course, not all articulations of the Elizabethan political imaginary were of an overtly literary nature, and Montrose cites texts by authors such as John Knox and Sir Thomas Smith which might fit such a non-literary category.³

Following Montrose, Colin Burrow circumscribes the kinds of texts that have been, in general, ‘the preserve of literary critics’, distinguishing them from those ‘that have traditionally been the preserve of historians’. For Burrow, literary texts ‘are to an unusual degree overdetermined in their relationships to other texts and projects, and tend to use the licence of fiction to exploit interactions between the various spheres of the Tudor political imaginary’.⁴ The Arcadia, in Burrow’s terms, being a literary rather than an historical text, is, as I hope to show, similarly overdetermined, and, as such, employs a high degree of fictional licence in its relationship to both its author’s identity and the political culture to which he contributed. This is what characterizes the Arcadia as a work of fiction. Nevertheless, as a politically-interested fiction, an examination of its relationships to its author, his projects and the political world in which he operated can add to our understanding of Sidney, Elizabethan culture and the influence Sidney sought to have on that culture.

Sidney’s Arcadia was originally begun, as Jean Robertson argues persuasively, ‘soon after his return from his embassy to Germany in June 1577’, and the first draft was completed by 1581.⁵ This original work has come to be known as the Old Arcadia. Sidney’s radical reworking of his romance ‘might have begun’, according to Victor Skretkowicz, ‘as early as 1582 and continued into 1584’.⁶ This revised version, which remained incomplete at Sidney’s death in 1586, is known as the New Arcadia. Sidney’s closest friend, Fulke Greville, was one of the editors who supervised the publication of the Arcadia in 1590. This edition was based on Sidney’s incomplete revision. Three years after the publication of what has come to be seen as Greville’s edition, Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, supervised the publication of another Arcadia, combining the revised work with the third, fourth and fifth books of the Old Arcadia; this is often referred to as ‘the composite Arcadia’. The Old Arcadia, used by Sidney Herbert for part of her 1593 edition, was originally circulated in manuscript and thought to be lost until Bertram Dobell’s discovery of three copies in the years 1906–07.⁷ By virtue of the romance having been dedicated to Sidney’s sister, the various editions of the Arcadia are all primarily titled The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

From its first appearances in contrasting print versions, the ethos of the Arcadia has been contested, and that contest has always involved a subordinate struggle over which version of the text has priority. In the very act of supervising its publication, Greville backed the revised version; likewise, the Countess of Pembroke blessed the text published in 1593. Modern critics, for their part, have sought to relate Sidney’s revisions to several postulated changes in his outlook over the period of their composition, usually citing particular personal or political stimuli that might have occasioned such changes. The revised Arcadia is undoubtedly very different from its first draft. Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her biography of Sidney, describes it as having ‘a quite different imaginative climate’ from the Old Arcadia, such that, in the new text, ‘the problems and dilemmas faced by the characters are often insoluble; there is no right course of action’.⁸ In this book, I shall read Sidney’s New Arcadia, in particular, as an expression of its author’s evident Philippist piety, which, I contend, informs many of the differences between this last version of his romance and its earlier incarnation.

The basic plot of the Arcadia is recognizably similar in both versions: two princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, of Macedon and Thessalia respectively, disguise themselves (the former as an Amazon warrior, the latter as a shepherd) to gain access to their beloved Arcadian princesses, Philoclea and Pamela, who have been secreted in a remote pastoral location; the princesses’ father, King Basilius, has sought to preserve his daughters’ safety after consulting the oracle at Delphi; both Basilius and his wife, Gynecia, fall in love with Pyrocles (disguised as an Amazon), which, understandably, complicates the prince’s courtship of Philoclea; the eventual resolution of this narrative, with the marriage of the two young couples, brings the Old Arcadia to a happy ending. This is in keeping with the Old Arcadia’s generic status, constructed as it is along the lines of a five-act Terentian stage comedy.⁹ The incomplete revision that is the New Arcadia, however, does not benefit from such a felicitous conclusion. Indeed, compared to the five books (or acts) of the original, the revised text ends mid-sentence, before the conclusion of the third book. Nevertheless, so substantial are Sidney’s additions to his romance that the revised version is still significantly longer than the original. In what amounts to a change in genre, away from the comedic and towards the epic (as will be discussed below in more detail), Sidney introduces considerably more involutions to the narrative, including a wholly new episode in which the princesses and Pyrocles (still disguised as an Amazon) are kidnapped by Basilius’s sister-in-law, Cecropia, who wishes to remove Basilius from his throne in favour of her own son, Amphialus. What becomes, in effect, Amphialus’s rebellion against his uncle’s rule institutes a significantly greater number of martial exploits, which, in keeping with the epic tone, multiply Sidney’s allusions to the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. In this context, the princes are able ‘to seek exercises of their virtue’ and pursue ‘heroical effects’, ‘like Ulysses and Aeneas’.¹⁰ Most significantly for this book, the character of Amphialus is a similarly epic figure, but, as Edward Berry observes, he ‘devotes all his heroic energies to corrupt ends’.¹¹ It is through the representation of the apparently irredeemable Amphialus that, I contend, Sidney most poignantly displays his religious ethos in the New Arcadia.

Other critics have read Sidney’s revised text in the context of the turn towards religious writing he seems to have made at the same time as revising his romance, but none has recognized the peculiarly Philippist character of this change. For example, Donald Stump notes Sidney’s ‘interest in translating [Guillaume de Salluste] du Bartas’ La Semaine, [Philippe Duplessis-] Mornay’s Trueness of the Christian Religion, and the Psalms’, but links this with a turn towards stoical passivity in the heroism of the Arcadia that does not reflect the particularity of Sidney’s piety.¹² Similarly, Katherine Duncan-Jones describes Sidney’s Arcadian princess, Pamela, as ‘a mouthpiece for Du Plessis Mornay’s account of the shared fundamentals of the Christian religion, spilling over from another of Sidney’s current literary projects’, without examining the Philippist inheritance of both authors.¹³ Duncan-Jones’s reading emphasizes Pamela’s ‘morally productive’ patience, which forms a significant part of her ‘proto-Christian nature’.¹⁴ Blair Worden also observes the same character displaying a ‘Stoic heroism’ in her passive resistance to oppression. Worden associates this fortitude with the contemporary philosophy of Christian Stoicism, which had its most influential expression in the works of Justus Lipsius (a Flemish humanist scholar with links to Sidney), who also translated the works of the classical author Tacitus.¹⁵ Nevertheless, as I shall show in this book, particularly in Chapters Three, Six and Seven, Sidney’s characters engage with the vicissitudes of the world in a manner that breaks free from the limits of the conventionally passive Christian Stoicism often associated with Sidney’s late Elizabethan milieu. The stoical outlook that arose in this period among Elizabethan courtiers like Sidney was associated with a real-life difficulty in achieving the ‘right course of action’. However, Sidney’s fiction, rather than betokening moral confusion, corroborates its author’s inclusive Christian philosophy, in which the vagaries of human agency are acknowledged and tolerated. Sidney draws his philosophical precepts from diverse, often arguably contradictory sources, but (in concord with the ecumenical spirit of his Philippist associates) he incorporates them without straining the limits of his (and their) peculiarly wide-ranging ethos. Moreover, just as Sidney’s poetics evinces a commitment to public affairs, the public values implied by the machinations of his fictional world reveal a morally and politically committed, though, as I shall show, less idealized author.

As Jill Kraye notes, in the chapter on ‘Moral Philosophy’ in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ‘in the Renaissance moral philosophy was divided into three parts: ethics, oeconomics and politics’, corresponding to their division between Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics and the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomics. As such, Renaissance authors tended to accept ‘the principle that ethics dealt with the individual, oeconomics with the family and politics with the state’.¹⁶ In a post-Reformation Christian context, however, the Fall of Man complicated the response of Christian thinkers to classical concepts of morality, with many judging the views of ancient philosophers to be the ‘vain and invalid’ products of ‘corrupt human reason’. In view of this, the division between classical and Christian systems became a more controversial and pressing issue than the tripartite division of classical moral philosophy itself. For Melanchthon, the putative source of Sidney’s piety,

the fall was also the central issue in ethics. He believed, however, that although man’s spiritual understanding of God’s law was totally vitiated by original sin, his rational knowledge of the law of nature, which was part of divine law, remained intact. So man was still able to judge whether external actions were right or wrong.¹⁷

As such, in Melanchthon’s view, Christians could use so-called ‘pagan’ philosophy to determine the ‘rules governing external action and civil society’. Moreover, though he was at pains to distinguish between theology and ethics, thereby maintaining the sanctity of God’s law, Melanchthon paved the way for the harmonization of Christian and classical ethical systems in the works of later authors.¹⁸ It is, therefore, a notable characteristic of Philippism that it incorporates religious piety, classical ethics, and also the behaviour of individuals as part of a wider civil society, which might ordinarily be termed ‘politics’.

In examining Sidney’s Arcadia through the lens of Philippism, I am building on the work of Robert E. Stillman, whose work on Sidney’s Defence of Poesy seeks to correct previous critical approaches to the author’s religion and politics, in particular those that have been ‘Anglo-centric’, ‘presentist’, or have paid too little attention to ‘Sidney’s consciousness of the public domain’. Stillman’s approach sees the Defence as ‘a cosmopolitan text informed by the values of a distinct, international body of Reformed humanists (the Philippists)’. Furthermore, in Stillman’s analysis, the unearthing of this previously unknown historical context for Sidney’s work ‘recover[s] for the past some portion of the particularity that gives it meaning’; Sidney, ‘[a]lways conscious that the circulation of texts carries public consequence’, defends poetry in an effort to show its power to promote Philippist virtues and so ‘disable tyranny and foster confessional harmony’.¹⁹ Although the recovery of such contexts is necessary and useful, Stillman’s approach to the Defence does not efface earlier readings and the portion of particularity they have each recovered. Indeed, knowledge of Sidney’s Philippism may modify, rather than wholly correct, what remains an Anglo-centric view of Sidney’s politics, for example, and Philippist values may be represented in distinctly different ways across the various literary projects of an author as versatile as Philip Sidney. I would contend that writing in the genre of romance not only necessitates a greater degree of freedom from the constraints of any informing set of values than does writing a defence of poetry, but also provides a broader canvas on which to paint the numerous, complex, often conflicting aspects of the parochial as well as cosmopolitan operations of any such philosophy.²⁰ As such, I wish to emphasize the particularity of Sidney’s romance as an expression of his values rather than the particularity of his values per se. If one were to consider Sidney’s works as examples of cultural analysis in the terms outlined by Raymond Williams in his book The Long Revolution, The Defence of Poesy could be considered as an example of the ‘ideal’ category, ‘in which culture is a state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal values’. In such terms, the Arcadia would fall into the ‘social’ category, in which the ‘analysis of culture … is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture’.²¹ Here, it is the particularity (as opposed to the idealization) of both the culture and the analysis of that culture that the Arcadia represents that is significant. In an important work on Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, entitled On Not Defending Poetry, Catherine Bates ‘argues that Sidney’s text is feeling its way towards a model of poetry that is de-idealist’.²² Bates identifies two opposing voices in the Defence: the treatise’s ‘official’ voice, which promotes an idealist model of poetry, content-filled and profitable; and an ‘unofficial’ voice, referred to as that of ‘Sidney’ (though avoiding charges of intentionalism), which is open to doubts about poetry’s value.²³ My reading of Sidney’s Arcadia chimes with Bates’s argument with respect to its acknowledgement of a non-idealizing aspect of Sidney’s oeuvre. As will soon become apparent, however, I depart from Bates in retaining the teleological element implicit in Sidney’s idealizing poetics, not least because of my focus on Sidney’s Protestant theology, an ethos which is inevitably fixed on salvation.

My purpose in undertaking a Philippist reading of the Arcadia is, in part, to present Sidney’s ‘poetics of Renaissance cosmopolitanism’ in practice rather than in theory. Stillman’s major achievement, as well as recovering a significant part of the historical context for Sidney’s Defence (and for, by implication, his other works), is in theorizing Sidney’s ‘exemplary poetics’.²⁴ Sidney’s Defence of Poesy has long been regarded as the classical English Renaissance statement of what Williams calls ‘the idea of art as creation, in a kind of rivalry with God’.²⁵ Stillman’s work adds considerable new sophistication and understanding to this conventional picture, emphasizing the subtlety of Sidney’s piety and the significance of his belief in the pre-eminence of poetry as a form of discourse in the public domain. Stillman successfully wrests the Defence from the problematic context of English Calvinism preferred in earlier accounts of Sidney’s Protestant commitment.²⁶ Sidney’s education, under the supervision of his mentor, the French Huguenot diplomat, Hubert Languet, and other Melanchthonians among Languet’s circle, exposed him to a peculiarly pragmatic form of Protestant piety.²⁷ As an apposite example of Philippist piety, Stillman cites the funeral oration composed by Joannes Crato, another pupil of Melanchthon, following the death, in 1576, of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II. The oration, as Stillman attests, celebrates a ruler who is ‘the very embodiment of Philippist virtue’; he is ‘the image of moderation … who learned what imperial power is by understanding what human weakness is’, and ‘who wished to manage political life by counsel rather than by force’.²⁸ As I will discuss in more detail below, especially in Chapters One and Seven, the issues surrounding consiliary access to Sidney’s monarch, Elizabeth, are important to the argument of this book, which reads his literary texts as forms of politically-interested public discourse.

Stillman’s case, more specifically, rests on the correlation between a Sidneian poetics and a Melanchthonian piety that share a commitment to the ‘cooperative power of the [human] will’. Unlike the harsh limitation placed on human agency by Calvinist theology, Philippist belief allows the individual will greater freedom to ‘cooperate with God in securing salvation’.²⁹ This is reflected in the Defence’s category of the ‘right poet’, whose poetry has the power to move, to bridge the gap between ‘our erected wit’ and our post-lapsarian ‘infected will’. As Stillman notes, this movement is achieved, in part, through the poet’s ‘power to impart (contemplatively) real self- knowledge—the enjoyment of our own divine essence’. Ultimately, inspired to acts of virtue by the product of the poet’s wit, the ‘infected will’ may be restored to a ‘condition of goodness’.³⁰ This is, as Sidney writes, predicated on the condition that the readers of poetry ‘learn aright why and how that maker made him’.³¹ Despite this qualification, there remains the potential for human agency in the quest for liberation from sin.³²

Such ideas, evident in The Defence of Poesy, may also be used to read Sidney’s other writings. When looking for evidence of Sidney’s poetic manifesto in his own works, critics have often found a significant gap between Sidney’s theory and practice. Gavin Alexander, in a review of Stillman’s book on the Defence, wonders

why Sidney’s fictions fail so designedly to provide the clearly exemplary characters and situations that his theory requires. Stillman insists persuasively on Sidney’s absolute commitment to his vocation as a poet. But if the Defence comes from so impassioned a world view, so heartfelt a set of religious and political beliefs, so absolute a conviction about poetry’s ability to transform the world around it, why does Sidney write the Arcadia in the way he writes it, with some pretty effective heroes, it is true, but who fall prey to error and failure and distraction?³³

This is the very issue I wish to address in this book: I will show how the heroic, yet often also flawed characters of Sidney’s Arcadia, particularly the revised version, do indeed represent the same Philippist beliefs that informed the writing of The Defence of Poesy. Alexander notes that ‘Stillman discusses the Arcadia relatively little, and Astrophil and Stella even less’, which, he says, ‘is a shame not only because the theory as represented by Stillman is bound to make one look afresh at the practice’.³⁴ I wish to begin this process by ‘looking afresh’ at the New Arcadia.

Like Alexander, Alan Sinfield, citing the Defence, notes Sidney’s apparent

insistence that characters in literature represent absolute moral qualities: nature has not produced ‘so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Aeneas’. Thus he simplifies fictional characters into abstractions, refusing to admit the existence of mixed or developing characters and the controversies they provoke—such as I have mentioned in relation to Orlando and Aeneas; and such as we experience in Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella.³⁵

For Sinfield, Sidney is ‘obliged to follow through the implications of his theory’, despite its inherent contradictions, particularly as regards ‘his idealised view of the provenance of poetry, as deriving from the erected wit which transcends the fallen condition’. Effectively, Sidney must efface the messy reality of what Sinfield terms ‘pagan literature’ in order to justify his own ‘earnest protestantism’. In what Sinfield characterizes as Sidney’s Calvinist worldview, ‘Figures in a prelapsarian idea can hardly be partly good and partly bad’.³⁶ Bates’s reading of the Defence of Poesy draws on Sinfield’s interpretation especially when challenging Sidney’s apparent faith that ‘poetry can realize the ideal, bring it to life in actual, practical, heroic and virtuous actions in the world’, ‘a faith that language means’ and that ‘its God-given, God-guaranteed meaning can be recovered’. This is what Sinfield terms ‘absolutist aesthetics’.³⁷ Nevertheless, as Stillman has shown, Sidney’s piety was a great deal less earnest (more specifically less Calvinist) than Sinfield allows. As such, the ‘mixed or developing characters and the controversies’ that Sinfield finds in the Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, however discordant they may be with the Defence, are not incompatible with Sidney’s religious outlook, and the critic must look elsewhere for the motive behind Sidney’s idealizing poetics.³⁸

Indeed, the source of Sidney’s putative theological viewpoint, Philip Melanchthon, sanctioned the reading of the very kind of romance that formed the basis of Sidney’s Arcadia (especially its revised version): An Aethiopian History, by the third-century Greek author, Heliodorus. On the title page of the Latin edition of Heliodorus’s romance, published in Basel in 1552, Melanchthon praises its ‘diversity of counsels, occasions, events, and states of mind’.³⁹ This is the text where Sidney would have found ‘so true a lover as Theagenes’. However, in Melanchthon’s view, An Aethiopian History is a repository of diversity as well as the figures of idealized virtue highlighted by Sidney in his Defence, and by Sinfield. Arthur Heiserman, in his book The Novel Before the Novel, describes An Aethiopian History as having a structure such that ‘The syntax of the action … has released information to the characters and to us in ways that may be said to imitate the involuted ways through which men discover and enact their destinies’.⁴⁰ This narrative characteristic, as William Craft has observed, also applies to Sidney’s New Arcadia: ‘the reader’s experience of contingency … imitates the contingency of human life’.⁴¹ Craft draws on Iris Murdoch’s idea that ‘form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe’.⁴² However, Craft, mindful of Sidney’s belief in God’s Providence, substitutes ‘contingency’ or ‘mystery’ for ‘aimlessness’.⁴³ In the context of early modern, Melanchthonian Protestantism, this mystery reflects human experience of the contingency of life, but also human impotence in the face of Divine Providence. The Philippist reader of Heliodoran romance would have recognized the characters’ continuing faith in the conventions of the genre to bring about a happy ending as analogous to the faith that true (in Philippist terms) Christians had in their ultimate salvation. Or, as Steve Mentz puts it, ‘rather like a romance-heroine, the Protestant believer triumphs by submitting to and cooperating with Divine will’.⁴⁴

The form and syntax of An Aethiopian History which drew approbation from Melanchthon, also led Sidney to praise Heliodorus’s creation as ‘an absolute heroical poem’, alongside Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.⁴⁵ Sidney appears to have shared the Renaissance view that Heliodorus’s romance was founded on the principles of epic derived from Virgil and Homer, beginning, as it does, in medias res. Both Jacques Amyot (the translator of An Aethiopian History into French) and Julius Caesar Scaliger, whose writings were noted influences on Sidney’s Defence, praised the epic nature of Heliodorus’s fiction.⁴⁶ Amyot, however, adds a note of criticism to his approval, bemoaning a certain lack of ‘grandeur’, ‘richness’ and ‘memorable feats of arms’ in the narrative.⁴⁷ Such comments appear, as Victor Skretkowicz suggests, to have influenced Sidney when he revised his Arcadia, the later version of which includes tilts and battles missing from its earlier incarnation. Indeed, the New Arcadia also begins in medias res, and eschews the five-act Terentian structure of the Old Arcadia in favour of a cyclical narrative similar to that adopted by Heliodorus; Sidney thus incorporates further features of what Skretkowicz terms ‘the Heliodoran heroic’.⁴⁸

Given Philip Melanchthon’s influence on Sidney’s piety, their shared admiration for the scope and variety of Heliodorus’s epic romance, and Sidney’s revision of his own romance along Heliodoran lines, the New Arcadia is the obvious choice from Sidney’s works to examine for evidence of his Philippist views. Although Sidney’s sonnet